Like most of the poets who emerged in the wake of the self-styled “Poetry Revival,”the Anglo-Welsh poet,Tony Curtis was influenced by American Twentieth Century poetry. He took a Master of Fine Arts from Goddard College, Vermont. This private university specialises in self-guided programmes of post-graduate study. Tony Curtis was the only UK poet to study there at the time.
The Goddard generation
He studied with a generation of readable, if not distinguished American poets such as Michael Ryan, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Robert Hass, Linnea Johnson, Norman Dubie and Mark Doty.
Michael Ryan’s 2007 poem “Insult,” in the November 5, 2007, New Yorker , is typical of the generation's style;
…Obviously I don’t know
what would be possible for you
with another body than mine,
but I love you and yours so dearly
the thought’s too much for me
The Whitman inheritance
The same conversational style can be seen in Tony Curtis’ verse.The American rhetoric combines a refined colloquiality with strict departure from any concern with the prosody of English verse, whether resolved iambics or some attempt to separate primary stresses being followed by other primaries. It has a breathy feel to it. This is consistent with the inheritance of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams and the subsequent diverse accentual languages of the New York School, the San Francisco School and the Black Mountain poets.
The "feel" of a shoot
Curtis’ Eight Pegs consists of an account of a Welsh game-shoot. The eight pegs are the eight poems, but also the pegs that mark the beaters’ trail. His language is rich, colloquial and densely descriptive. At times it betrays a misplaced academicism,
“A platter of abundance, the way the Dutch,
Van Aelst, or Buecklaer laid out the spoils of the hunt.”
No two artists could be more dissimilar in their still-lives, Bueckelaer (Belgian actually, to mimic Poirot) presents the active life of the food economy and Van Aelst its fixity of ornament. Yet this leads into the rhetorical position Curtis wants to achieve. He wants to fix a picture in the reader’s mind of the apparent atavism of slaughtering birds with leadshot; “...and “ (yet) "does not own a gun” (from the blurb). He then leads the reader to superimpose the pleasures of the relatively wealthy kitchen over the initial borderline of guilt.
American sensualism
In this he emulates American aesthetic sensualism that stems from William James, in which the feel of things adds to their meaning ; this from Autumn Again, by another Goddard poet, Caroline Finkelstein, in The Virginia Quarterly Review ,Summer 1993:
and the old paintings on the walls, always those
gardens of blame: your honor, your worship, it was her.
She is the art and the aftermath. And you swear
even the trees are exhausted by it, why else are they dying,
why else do the words, rich woman, ring like metal clanging?
She who has power over you. . . .
The well-stocked kitchen
The rich kitchen of the hunter casts "the art and the aftermath" of enchantment over Curtis in the same way as the old masters do in Finkelstein's poem. In the sixth poem, Curtis sows the seeds of guilt again by quoting the son of some American hunter with the blood of Bolivian justice on his hands, intoning his history of killing with assonantal precision. Whether the reader takes this in is less sure, as the "Well-stocked kitchen," in poem 5, contains non-kosher hare and rabbit which would not have been in Jesus, Martha and Mary’s kitchen, nor is the flick of a bird’s wing in any way “pointillist.” To be "pointillist" requires discreet points of paint, not natural flecks. Detail like this does not matter to Curtis, who mines his diction wholesale from the ethos of the “Hall” he mentions driving away from, after the shoot, in poem 1.
Yet it should matter.The attempt to recreate the Puritan and Jansenist inheritance of American culture with its dialectic of pleasure and distain simply does not translate. The guilt does not signify to the British ecological tradition and the pleasure is clichéd. The main thrust of British ecological poetry is the restoration of the breach with nature through conscious moral awareness. The American perspective assumes there is no breach, except through misplaced guilt.
The fine illustrations by Rozanne Hawkesley add their ambiguities of maimed and skeletal hunters with living birds. Her Baudelairean autopsy of the lines on a girl "looker "from Landeilo is grimly eloquent:
"Breast on breast they roll and bounce
with life as she comes our way."
The drawing of the feather opposite poem 7 is superb. Its evocation of the black and white texture of the softness and suppleness of a newly plucked breast feather is brilliantly excuted.
A style less travelled
Tony Curtis' style does not cross the Atlantic well. This is largely because his massed syllables simply do not counter the marked differences in stress patterns between American and English pronunciation. According to The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary by John C. Wells, British pronunciation has twenty three vowels used in Received Pronunciation. This gives more flexibility to British stress, but a greater need for control. Curtis' Welsh roots are even further away from American stress patterns. As Kelly Webb has discovered, "Welsh English has some similarities to stress in Welsh, namely a lengthened post-stress consonant. This finding supports impressionistic accounts in the past."
As well as this widespread phenomenon, General American, which ignores regional differences, has nineteen vowels, and three additional vowels for foreign words. This gives a tighter prosody. Anyone who has struggled with dyslexic readers in an international school knows that these differences play havoc with early reading in mixed classes. Those who are sceptical should try reading Dylan Thomas and with "words such as "flower", " or "water " in "A Grief Ago," rolled in reflex and the vowels tightened.
A grief ago,
She who was who I hold, the fats and the flower,
Or, water-lammed, from the scythe-sided thorn,
Curtis'
My two pheasants
Beginner's luck,
the first on the third drive,
coming low out of the trees of the slope
above the noisy stream.
needs to be read with tightened vowels and and the r-extended vowels before its rhythm becomes evident. The three short syllables "out of the " have a staccato ring in British English.
Formal metre has been largely abandoned by poets to-day. This is a shift in style which has to be accepted. While it reigned, the differences in phonology were hidden. It is for this reason that the findings of linguists are vital to continuity of style and that cultural differences between the pronunciation of words will loom large in future discussions of prosody.
Again according to G. Kochanski, et al in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. It is also common for dialects to differ in their stress placement for some words. For example, in British English, the word "laboratory" is pronounced with primary stress on the second syllable, while American English stresses the first. Such differences have a marked effect on meaning as, following Damron, the delaying of primary stress until the end of a line in British English is important in signalling the uptake of a poet's sense. In the last line of poem 8, for example "all the colours of the world still moving," the lack of a stress distinction between "colours " and "world " throws the reference to "moving" askance. Does "moving" refer to "colours" or "world?"
Shape without stress
Curtis seems to have an ambivalent view of metre. Like so many Revival poets he considers structure to be a top-down process. This from The Guardian of April 1, 2005
” I believe that writers who seriously want to be poets should learn about and then explore some of the formal disciplines of poetry: the sonnet, the sestina, the ballad, haiku (westernised via Pound) and the villanelle. Of course, poets may choose to write exclusively in free verse; but writers who decide that the traditions are not for them will do so with more conviction knowing that, if they chose to, they could write in form.”
It is typical that form, for Curtis, should not have anything to do with poetic stress patterns. Only stress patterns that impose a deliberate and aesthetic regularity can be referred to as disciplines. All the above forms, rhyming or not, can be written in free verse. Apart from the sonnet which can also be written in free verse, we do not have a tradition of the villanelle etc, except as Victorian curiosities. It would have been a different matter if formal discipline applied to metre.
There is craftsmanship here and a sense of experienced thrill. His descriptions of the shoot are accurate enough to portray this, especially as he claims the unsureness of an amateur, but the music of his stress is in chaos.
Sources:
- Damron, Rebecca L. (2004) "Prosodic Schemas," in Discourse Across Languages and Cultures, ed. by Carol Lynn Moder and Aida Martinovic-Zic. Amsterdam, John Benjamins
- Ed. Var.(2011) American Heritage Dictionary Of The English Language The , Fifth Edition. New York Houghton Mifflin
- Kochanski, G. et al. (2005) Loudness predicts prominence: Fundamental frequency lends little. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, volume 118, number 2, pages 1038-1054
- Thomas, Dylan (1936); "A Grief Ago" in Twenty-Five Poems London, Dent
- Webb, Kelly (2011) The Realisation of stress in Welsh English International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, XVII;20109 Available from http://www.icphs2011.hk/resources/OnlineProceedings/RegularSession/Webb/Webb.pdf. Accessed 09/02/12
- Wells, John,(2008) The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. London, Longmans
Duncan McGibbon - By contributing writer, Bath (UK) Institute Convenor and Wells Festival Prize-Winner, Duncan McGibbon
